


All Your Paper Maps

by elanoides



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Birthday, Gen, Immortality, and the rest of the crew - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-09 01:04:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16440164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elanoides/pseuds/elanoides
Summary: Humans aren't supposed to live more than a hundred years. But now Lucretia, Barry, and Magnus are looking down the barrel of immortality, or something like it. (Or: a character study of the humans aboard the Starblaster.)





	All Your Paper Maps

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Dessa's "Sound the Bells."  
> Oh and boys, bear it well / Put all your paper maps away / Mercator here can't help...
> 
> This was written for the 2018 TAZ Big Bang (although my partner dropped out at the last minute).

It happened in an instant. The worst things always do.

Lucretia remembers exactly where she was standing. What she was doing. She had a journal open in one hand, taking quick bullet notes on the feeling of acceleration and the sight of the crowds, and as the Hunger descended she wrote that down, too, until her mind caught up with her hands and she realized— understood— realized, but did not understand what she was seeing.

Barry remembers it in fits and starts, as though glancing back over his shoulder. But it’s clear in those moments: the Hunger plunging down from the heavens, the Starblaster dodging and weaving through its tendrils, the cold sweat of fear when he thought deliriously, _I never thought the end of the world would look like this_.

Magnus remembers the feeling of it. He remembers the vastness of the Hunger, the streaks of color rippling through it, the way it blotted out their home plane. He remembers, all too well, the panic and anger and fear. Fear— the Starblaster was thick with it.

And they all remember, because it’s probably burned into them by the cosmic shock of it, the feeling of being unraveled and put back together.

And they all remember, because how could they not— how could they ever forget, no matter how hard they tried— the sight of their plane below them, but not their plane. Never their plane again.

 

Magnus dies.

Magnus _comes back_.

Magnus is— alive— but how could he—

(There, Lucretia’s notes break down a little. She berates herself for it the next cycle. She forgives herself for it ten cycles on.)

 

They have a meeting about it.

Davenport calls the crew together after dinner, sits them down in the living room, such as it is. Two couches, three armchairs, a bookshelf.

“The first order of business is pretty clear, I think,” Davenport says. “Magnus is alive. And we’re all thankful for that, obviously—”

“You better be,” Magnus interjects.

“—but we need to figure out what’s going on.”

Outside, the dusky evening is split through with lacy clouds. They all keep glancing out the window at it and pretending they aren’t. The sky is clear. The sky is clear.

“Well, we keep resetting,” Barry says. “There’s a boundary, maybe, between planar systems— whatever we cross— and we’re all back exactly like we were when we left.”

“Yeah, I still have this dang cut on my face,” Merle agrees.

“I have a black eye again,” Magnus says, nodding. “Also, I’m not dead anymore, which, great, but yeah. That’s a big one.”

“But like— okay,” Lup says, “but how the _fuck_ did that happen? Cause we left, the Hunger came, we left again, we showed up again. Then the Hunger came, we left, and now Magnus is alive. Don’t need a degree in planar physics to tell you that’s _not_ supposed to happen.”

“I have a degree in planar physics,” Barry says, “and I have no idea how that happened.”

“Yeah, none of us do, homie.” Taako’s draped over the arm of the couch, but his eyes are sharp. “That’s the problem.”

“Lucretia?” Davenport asks. “Any ideas?”

Lucretia panics— just for a second— stops herself. _Stay calm, Lu._ “I don’t know. I’ve never read anything about this, anything like this…”

She recognizes it, though. The call, the threshold, the abyss, the return. The Hero’s Journey is always depicted as a cycle; Lucretia never thought that’d be quite so literal.

But they’re not living a fairy tale. They’re living the cold hard blankness of space and silence, even if it doesn’t seem to be able to kill them.

“Well,” Davenport says, “we’ll have to figure this out, but right now our first priority should be getting to know this world. There seem to be some inhabitants, a few small cities, nothing big. We can probably find a quiet spot to land tomorrow. I’ll keep us in orbit for the night. Try to get some sleep.” He glances around at the crew. “Anyone have anything to add? No? Okay. Dismissed.”

As the crew scatters, extricating themselves from the surprisingly squishy chairs and couches, Davenport catches Magnus’s eye and waves him over. Lucretia stays, nose in her journal again, but listens. She’s a biographer, after all, and… well, fine, a bit of a snoop. But that comes with the job.

“Magnus,” Davenport says, “I wanted to talk to you briefly.”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

Davenport sighs. Pinches the bridge of his nose. “You died.”

“And now I’m back!”

“Yes, and now you’re back. Listen.” Davenport’s voice drops low; Lucretia has to strain a little to hear. “That’s a lot of pressure on you. If you ever need to— to talk, or anything—”

Somewhere in Magnus’s shoulders, something tightens, something releases. He breathes out a long, slow breath. “Thanks, Cap’n’port. Don’t worry about me.”

“All right,” Davenport says, but he looks like he doesn’t believe it. Magnus leaves, and Davenport does too, and then it’s just Lucretia, there on the squishy, faded couch.

It’s dark now, fully night. Lucretia gets up, journal tucked under one arm, and crosses the room to stand on tiptoe and peer out the porthole, one hand cupped around her face to shield the glare from the lamps inside. There are stars out there. Thousands of them. The sky is clear.

 

Barry’s the one who brings it up first. A couple months into their second cycle, he finds Lucretia on the lower back deck, which she’s co-opted for herself. They all claimed their own places on the ship, outside their bunks and their offices. Space to themselves. Barry’s is a table he dragged under one of the round portholes. Lup and Taako share the kitchen. Magnus claimed the upper deck, Merle took the little sundeck in the bow, and Davenport reserved a chair to himself in the living room. Lucretia’s spot on the lower back deck is the quietest, laid over with the hum of the bond engine, and out of the way enough that anyone stopping by would have to mean to be there.

The deck is small, with a rail across the back. There’s a hammock stretched across it. Barry thinks he recognizes the little side table— might have used to be in the living room— but it’s here now, with a scattering of pens and loose paper in the open drawer and used mugs stacked on top. He can see at least five journals without even trying.

Lucretia looks up when he cracks open the door. “Barry?”

“Yeah. Can I come in? Uh, out?”

“Sure,” she says, and gets out of the hammock to stand facing him. Her journal stays tucked under her arm. “What is it?”

Barry sighs. This is turning out to be harder than he expected by a long shot. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Okay with what?”

“All this. The resurrection, cycles, whatever.”

Lucretia seems to get what he’s asking. “Because we don’t know how long this will go on for.”

“Right. I mean, I hope it stops soon, obviously—”

“I think we all do,” she says dryly.

“—but there’s a possibility that this is going to go on for a while. We don’t know how to stop this, we don’t know how it works. Theoretically, there’s no limit.”

“Magnus’s… resurrection… suggests we reset completely,” she says. “Merle got his black eye back, all that. So our physical bodies probably won’t degrade. Which means we’re functionally immortal.”

“Yeah. I wasn’t going to put it that way. It’s just— most of this crew is supposed to live a couple centuries anyway. But we’re humans. I mean, we’re squishy. And now we can’t die. I’m the science officer here, I studied long-haul travel, and everything we know says humans aren’t equipped to live forever.”

“You don’t think I’ve been through this already?” Lucretia turns and retrieves a journal from the side table. She flicks through it, finds her spot, and marks a chunk of pages with her fingers. “This is the existential crisis I had last month.”

Flipping back through old notes— Barry did a lot of that, when he was a researcher. “It’s not good to bottle your emotions up.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

He hadn’t meant to, but she’d just turned twenty when they left, and Magnus is a year younger— it’s hard not to think of them as kids. He’s over twice their age. “What’d you decide? In your crisis.”

She turns, leans her elbows on the railing, stares out into the low afternoon sunlight. “I am a biographer. I write so that others will be remembered. I came on this expedition to put it in the history books. Immortalizing people is my trade.” Lucretia turns back to him, though her gaze is awfully far away. “So I suppose I’m getting what I wanted after all.” Her eyes focus, clear. “Barry?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you certain _you’re_ okay with this?”

No, he isn’t. Not at all.

“I’m fine,” Barry says. “Just wanted to make sure you were holding up.”

“You should probably talk to Magnus anyway,” Lucretia says, “given he’s the one who died.”

“Would if I could. Do you know where he is?”

“Around somewhere. He’s been in and out a lot, but I don’t think he goes far.”

Barry nods. “Right. I’ll track him down.” He opens the door, goes to leave, stops. “Lucretia.”

She looks up from her journal, eyebrow raised.

“We should— you and me and Magnus— we should look out for each other. Keep an eye out. Since we’re the most… you know. Humans.”

There’s a pause, and then Lucretia says, “All right.”

Barry shuts the door quietly behind him.

 

Magnus hasn’t stopped moving since he died.

He’s slept, sure, mostly when he was about to collapse from exhaustion, but he doesn’t seek it out. He falls out of bed as soon as he wakes up and goes for a run. He eats breakfast with the crew, they split for the day, and Magnus works his tail off until he can’t make another excuse for why he’s late for dinner. After that he works out again, runs or does bodyweight exercises until he’s too tired to continue. He falls asleep with his heartbeat in his ears.

Davenport brings it up to him, asks if he’s doing all right. Lup stands on the gangplank with her hands on her hips and yells, “Magnus, get your butt in here, I made lasagna!” Merle offers multiple herbal remedies for sore muscles. He ignores them for the most part, acquiesces to the twins’ dinner calls, but keeps on going. He’s working out, helping the crew, getting stronger. It feels good.

It’s Barry who finally pins him down, early one morning as he’s getting back from his first workout of the day. The sun is mostly up; Magnus left when the sky was barely light. He went out until his legs started to ache, then turned and retraced his steps, keeping his gait easy, his pace slow. The air has the clear, sweet scent of blueberries.

He rounds the last corner into the clearing where they parked the Starblaster and slows to a stop, bending over to catch his breath. He’s never out of breath when he runs, but as soon as he stops, it’s like he’s drowning. Like he should have just kept running.

When he can breathe again, he stands up, and there’s Barry, climbing down from the deck in a Museum of Interplanar Science t-shirt and threadbare jeans. Barry gets down the ladder, turns, waves. Magnus waves back.

“Good run?” Barry asks.

Magnus nods. “Yeah.” He folds his arms over his head, stretches one way, then the other.

“Uh— listen, Magnus,” Barry says. “You’ve been pushing yourself pretty hard lately.”

“Just getting stronger,” Magnus says. “That’s my job.” Barry looks like he’s going to object; Magnus cuts him off. “I’m security, it’s _literally_ my job.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m just saying, it’s, uh—” Barry sighs. He looks wildly uncomfortable. “You don’t have to prove anything. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, ‘course.”

“So you can take a break sometime. Sleep in a little.”

“Nah, I don’t need to.” He really doesn’t. He’s getting plenty of sleep.

“You— it’s a medical necessity, you have to sleep.”

“I’m fine.”

“No,” Barry says, and sits down on the ladder with his arms crossed. Is that supposed to keep Magnus from getting back on the ship? “You’re gonna hurt yourself. And! And as soon as we reset, you’re gonna lose all that muscle, because your body resets.”

“Yeah, but until then—”

“You’re going to burn yourself out,” Barry says. “You keep going like this, you’re gonna get hurt.” He sounds sincere, Magnus realizes. “We need you. And you gotta accept you’re not gonna beat the Hunger by getting super buff. The Hunger doesn’t care how strong you are.”

“Well, if I die, maybe I can take a little of it with me,” Magnus says, and he moves to push past Barry.

“Is that what this is about?” Barry’s looking at him, expression changing into something… else.

Magnus does not want, and has never wanted, pity.

Barry keeps talking. “I’m scared too,” he says. “I’m so fucking scared. Every day. We all are. Cap’n’port’s sleeping less than you. Lucretia never puts down her journals and I don’t think Taako has relaxed for a second since we left the Hunger last time.”

Magnus walked up behind Lup last week and tapped her shoulder. She wasn’t expecting it, didn’t hear him, and she spun around with a fireball in each hand. Didn’t throw them, but the look on her face… yeah. Magnus figures Barry’s got it right.

“You _died_ ,” Barry says. “I mean, that’d fuck anyone up. But you gotta talk to us, Magnus. You gotta. And you can, okay? If you need to.” He finally stands up off the ladder. “I think breakfast’s ready.”

Magnus brushes by Barry, climbs up on deck. Barry follows, and when Magnus is about to open the door and go in, he says, “Lucretia and I, we were talking. Since we’re the humans, and we’re not really supposed to be immortal, and now we are… we should stick together. So. If you want to talk. We can do that.”

“Okay,” Magnus says, and he goes in to breakfast.

The rest of the crew is already in the kitchen, sitting at the table or leaning against the counters. Lup and Taako are bent over a waffle iron; Taako’s making waffles, and Lup is bruleeing them, each finger burning with a jet of blue fire. Davenport has his hands wrapped around the biggest coffee mug on the ship. Lucretia and Merle are sitting at the table, eating brulee waffles.

“Now that everyone’s here,” Davenport says, “the plan for the day is to take a day off. Weather seems good, so we might as well take a break and do some team bonding. Does anyone have any experiments or projects that can’t wait?”

He looks around at the crew. When his eyes fall on Magnus, he seems to expect a response. Magnus shrugs and shakes his head, and Davenport moves on, assigning chores and parts of the picnic.

It’s going to be a good day.         

 

Barry’s first death was an accident, no matter what the rest of the crew says.

He’d been experimenting with the Light in the middle of the year, trying to get a read on it with literally any of his instruments, and he’d… well…

He’d been trying to figure out its pH, if it had a pH, and instead the Light started some sort of reaction that dissolved Barry’s instruments, as well as the table with all the acids and bases on it, which proceeded to corrode the cabinet under the table and react with its contents, and _that_ had been what caused the localized explosion that didn’t disable the Starblaster, due to the stasis field around the lab, but did thoroughly vaporize Barry.

The first thing he says when he resurrects is “Did anyone get my notes?”

“No, dipshit,” Taako says, “cause you vaporized yourself.”

“Did anyone get the Light?”

“The Light’s fine,” Davenport says with a sigh. He already looks like he has a headache. “We discussed this, Barry, you need to put more thought into lab safety.”

“The stasis field worked exactly the way it’s supposed to,” Barry says.

“And you blew yourself up,” Davenport says.

“It was fine, though. All in the name of science.”

Davenport pinches the bridge of his nose.

Barry will go on to die half a dozen more times specifically in pursuit of Science. He will never once regret it.

 

There’s a rotation for who’s supposed to make supply runs. It usually gets thrown out at some point, whether it has to be rewritten because someone died, or because nobody actually wants to run errands.

This cycle’s chore chart was folded into a paper airplane within weeks, and the rotation for supply runs was part of that. Nobody thinks anything of it until they all sit down to dinner and realize Taako and Lup just made fantasy Hot Pockets and a pitcher of lemon-lime fantasy Kool-Aid, because that was what was left in the cupboard. It’s kind of weird, sure, but Lucretia is happy to let it go. She ate a lot worse in college. Davenport, however, isn’t as willing.

“Okay,” Davenport says, with an edge of his Captain Voice. “Someone needs to do a supply run. Preferably asap.”

Magnus upends a bottle of ranch over his plate. “Why? We have Hot Pockets.”

“I’ve seen you eat ranch with so many things,” Taako says, sounding deeply affronted, “but ranch on Hot Pockets is just _weird_.”

“Ranch is good,” Barry tells him, and gestures for Magnus to pass it.

“And sriracha’s any better?” Lucretia asks. She’s seen her friends eat all manner of horrifying things, including most of these Hot Pocket-condiment combinations, but it’s still frankly disgusting.

Lup waves across the table. “Hey, if you’re not gonna use the sriracha, pass it down.” Lucretia is leaning over to hand it to her when she hears Merle interject and stops dead.

“You’re all wrong,” Merle proclaims. “The only way to eat a Hot Pocket is raw.”

The table falls silent as Merle produces a frozen fantasy Hot Pocket from god knows where and, without preamble or dissembling, chomps into it. He washes it down with a gulp of Kool-Aid and belches.

“Power move,” Magnus says, with a nod of respect.

Davenport has his head in his hands. “Okay. Magnus and Lucretia, you’re on the supply run.”

“Wait, why do we have to go?” Magnus asks indignantly.

He fixes them both with his Captain Look. “This is for the good of the crew. I don’t think anyone wants a repeat of these Hot Pocket sins.” Lup toasts him with her Hot Pocket, now dripping sriracha. “Also, you’re still technically the youngest, so I’m pulling rank. I’ll give you a list.”

“Okay, Dad,” Magnus might have mumbled at that, but Lucretia was the only one close enough to hear him, and she’s sure not going to tell.

They walk to the town of Kessel the next day. They missed the Light’s fall, but this plane is built up enough that they can travel from place to place, asking around for witnesses. They’ll leave tomorrow, probably, since Kessel has turned up almost nothing.

“Davenport gave me the list,” Lucretia says, holding it out, “so we should probably get this first.”

“First?” Magnus asks.

“Barry, Merle, Lup, and Taako all gave me their own lists.”

“Do you also have a list?”

“Of course.” Honestly, it’s like he doesn’t even know her.

Magnus nods. “Okay. Where do we go first?”

Lucretia looks around. Kessel’s not a big town; they’re standing on the only real street corner. “I think I see a general store down there.”

They cross the street, passing a couple kids pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with plums. This plane is covered with orchards, and the smaller towns live and trade off their local fruit. The buildings in Kessel are all built out of plum tree wood and stained dark with plum juice. The door of the general store, which creaks as Lucretia opens it, is pained dark purple to match.

“So Davenport’s list is mostly the basics,” Lucretia says as she and Magnus walk between shelves and baskets. “Food and supplies.”

“What about everyone else?”

“Uh… there’s a lot of alcohol. Barry wants sunscreen and chips. Lup and Taako put a bunch of cooking stuff on this list. Taako says any fruit we haven’t seen so far.”

“Wait, there’s more kinds of fruit?”

“Apparently.”

There is more fruit, as it turns out, all imported from other towns: pitted fruits that look like apples and taste like cherries, fruits with peels that taste like watermelon, tiny fruits that burst between her teeth and stain her mouth blue. The local goods are mostly plum-based. Lucretia and Magnus pick out bottles of plum brandy and sweet plum wine, and even find baked plum chips, which are enough like regular potato chips that they figure Barry will be okay. Lucretia looks for paints and finds a set that seem to be dyed with plum juice; it’s all in shades of purple, pink, and yellow.

It takes over an hour, but Magnus and Lucretia eventually locate everything on their shopping lists and go to the counter to pay. The storekeeper rings them up, marking items off her catalogue. “This is an awful lot of supplies, isn’t it?”

“We’re shopping for our entire crew,” Lucretia explains.

“Your crew? Oh, my.” The storekeeper adds Barry’s plum chips to the tally and picks up the next item, a bottle of plum brandy. She blinks at it, then looks at Magnus and Lucretia apologetically. “I’m sorry, dears, but I certainly can’t let you buy this. Neither of you is old enough.”

“What’s the drinking age here?” Magnus asks. “Cause I’m pretty sure we’re both older than that. I mean, I’m like forty-five now, right?”

The storekeeper laughs. “Forty-five! My stars. Young man, you’re nineteen or I’m a donkey.”

“No, really, I look young for my age,” Magnus tries.

He’s right, technically, but Lucretia still nudges him aside. “Shh, stop talking.” It’s early in the year yet, which means Magnus really is physically nineteen. “I’m twenty-one,” she says to the storekeeper. “Is that the drinking age here?”

“Twenty-one it is,” the storekeeper says, “but I’m right good at guessing ages, and if you’re a day over twenty I’ll eat my hat.” She smiles at them, a smile that seemed welcoming before but now smacks of condescension. “It was a good try. Send someone a little older next time, all right?”

As soon as Lucretia gets out the door of the shop, she lets out a loud groan, punctuated with a decisive “ _Fuck_.”

“What?” Magnus asks.

“I’m not a child,” she snaps back, before sighing. “Sorry. Not you.”

“I kinda forgot we’re not— however old we are,” he says.

“Immortality does that to you,” Lucretia agrees, but it sounds hollow to her hears.

When they get back to the Starblaster, Lup pops her head out of the nearest porthole. “You guys get everything?”

“Almost,” Lucretia calls back. “They carded us on the alcohol.” She pushes the bitterness out of her voice. The storekeeper was just doing her job, and she had a point, really; Lucretia may be forty-five but her body is twenty, and that’s just the way it is.

Barry appears from behind the ship. “They did what?”

“Aren’t you like fifty now?” Lup asks, now leaning half out of the porthole.

“Yeah, but we don’t look like it,” Magnus says, swinging his backpack off his shoulders.

Lucretia nods. “Physically we’re both under the drinking age.”

“What’s that for humans?” Lup asks.

“Twenty-one, in some places, anyway.”

“ _Really?_ Wow.”

“I can go into town and get the alcohol,” Barry says. “I’m old enough.”

“So am I,” Lucretia points out, “and Magnus too.” It’s _fucking annoying_ , is what it is. She talked her way onto this expedition, she’s forty-five for gods’ sake, but somehow she’s still being treated like a child.

“You could get a fake ID,” Lup suggests.

“Left it at home,” Lucretia sighs, and the way Lup, Barry, and Magnus turn to her in shock is almost worth the whole debacle.

“What did you need a fake ID for?” Magnus asks, eyes wide.

“So I could vote,” Lucretia says, adding after a beat, “Also wine, I also used it to buy wine.”

Magnus bursts out laughing. Lup almost falls out of the porthole as she yells, “Thattagirl, Lu!” Barry’s starting to show his I-Am-The-Only-Sane-One expression.

Lucretia smiles.

 

The ship’s records used to be neatly kept. Protocol and all that. But protocol broke down somewhere around the second decade. Barry had a number-letter system for his lab notebooks, he’s pretty sure— was it number for year, letter for order? Or is the letter the month? Or the lunar cycle? Did he mean to color-code the third decade? He has far too many lab notebooks to go through, and only some of them are dated.

Barry shucks up the sleeves of his sweater and flips through the next notebook. Trajectory calculations with a wind vector, laid over a triple coordinate system— this must be the steam geyser plane. That was… twelve cycles ago? Thirteen?

“Hey, Lucretia,” he shouts into the living room.

“Still reading,” Lucretia yells back, hidden by the back of the couch. “Still ask again later. Still not my fault you didn’t date your notebooks.”

Barry sighs and goes back to the notebook. Cycle thirty-three was the underground city plane, and he’s pretty sure the geyser plane was after that. Thirty-six, maybe? And speaking of, what cycle is it, anyway?

There’s a calendar on the wall in the kitchen. Barry gets up and goes in, ducking past Merle as he leaves with a mug of steaming rooibos tea. “Any left in the pot?”

“Nope!” Merle says cheerfully, vanishing around the corner.

Barry sighs and turns to the bulletin board. The cork backing has disappeared entirely behind the mess of paper pinned to it. There’s a map of the current plane, a map from five planes ago, a newspaper cutout from the time Lup got convicted for arson, the last seven flight plans, a handful of spice packets— oh, there it is, half-covered by the chore chart that always gets lit on fire a couple months into the cycle.

Barry extricates the calendar and flattens it out on the kitchen table. Every day so far is marked off with an _X_ , whether drawing pencil, purple glitter marker, or regulation black pen. He flips it over. The cover has a big _49_ scribbled on it in blue pencil.

Cycle 49.

He hasn’t really thought about the cycle number in a while. He knew it was almost in the fifties, sure, but now that he thinks about it, that’s an awful lot of time. It’s been forty-nine years aboard the Starblaster.

That would make him… what? He was fifty-four when they left, right? Forty-nine plus fifty-four, which adds up to a hundred and three years old.

Not physically. Physically he’s fifty-four. But his mind has lived a hundred and three years.

_Holy shit,_ Barry thinks.

“Lucretia?” he calls, still staring at the calendar.

“ _Reading_.”

“How old are you?”

There’s a pause, and then the creak of the couch as Lucretia sits up behind him.

“Seventy. I turned seventy last month. Magnus is still sixty-nine, remind me to tell him that, he’ll like it.”

“Sure.”

“How old are you?”

“A hundred and three.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yup. Yeah.” Barry turns to face her. “I guess I haven’t kept track for a while. But I’m officially a century old.”

“Do we throw a party?”

“I don’t know if the rest of the crew would get it. Taako and Lup were already on their second century when we left, Merle and Davenport were probably older.”

Lucretia nods. “Team human.”

“Team human.”

“What made you bring that up? No… memory problems, or anything?”

Barry sighs. “No. I don’t _feel_ a hundred and three.” He doesn’t, either. His body is fifty-four, his brain is working like he’s fifty-four.

But it’s strange, to think that. He’s lived an entire century. Almost half of it aboard this ship. And he didn’t even notice.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” he says, thinking out loud. “It’s just my memories. Those are entirely theoretical. Self-contained. So it doesn’t matter if I’m fifty-four or a hundred and three or twenty-one, whatever.” Lucretia’s twenty-one, he recalls. Her body, anyway. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“I don’t think it does if you don’t want it to.” Lucretia shrugs. “I have seventy years of knowledge in the functioning brain of a twenty-one-year-old. It works pretty well.”

“I can’t believe I forgot I’m a hundred years old,” Barry says.

“Maybe you _are_ getting forgetful in your old age.”

“Might not be so bad.”

Lucretia had laid back down, book open on her chest, but she turns her head back to look at him. “Really?”

“If we’re gonna be functionally immortal, might as well enjoy it. It means… it means we have time.”

“All the time in the world.”

Lucretia returns to her book. Barry goes back to his desk and keeps sorting his notebooks. He scribbles the cycle number inside the front cover and stacks them in order. Forty-nine notebooks is up to his shoulders when he piles them on the floor. He looks at his desk. There’s room for a tall stack on either side, to the ceiling if he gets Taako to cast a stasis spell on them, or if Magnus could make him a bookshelf. Forty-nine years, a hundred and three years, and he didn’t even notice. Maybe he should ask Magnus for that bookshelf now. Room to grow.

 

 

 

It’s quiet in space. Out in the dark, in the star-flecked void, with the bond Eegine singing them onward, there is the quiet between breaths on a smoky summer night. Quiet, and vast, in a way that comforts and saddens at once. There’s so much space and their home is nowhere in it, but it might still be out there somewhere.

Sometimes they find each other there. The Starblaster makes as much sense as infinity and so the three of them sit with their feet dangling over the side of the deck, over brilliant, endless space. Everything is small out there; paradoxically, it makes life feel bigger. A streak of light, going swiftly through the endless stars.

It’s easier to be immortal when the universe feels as old and as young as you.

 

 

 

The seventy-sixth plane is a spiderweb of bureaucracy. Everyone who so much as thinks about approaching the airspace has to be properly registered and identified, and the Starblaster presents a number of complications. Lucretia, Barry, and Davenport are nominated as the most likely to be able to navigate the plane without causing an interplanar diplomatic incident or literally murdering someone, which is why Lucretia is here now, sitting in a gray cubicle in front of a government agent who doesn’t seem to be understanding why they don’t have any official identification.

“How old are you?” the agent asks. She’s maybe twenty-three, a junior member of the government.

Lucretia sighs. “I’m twenty,” she says, because it’s easier.

“Huh,” the agent says. “Really?”

“No, I lied to you about my age to make this whole process even more difficult.”

“Oh, no, sorry,” the agent says, “I meant that as a compliment, really! You look older than that.”

Lucretia is taken aback at that. “I do?”

“Yeah,” the agent says, flipping over the form she’s filling out for Lucretia and continuing on the back. “In a nice way. It looks good on you.”

Is she being… flirted with?

“Thank you?” Lucretia says.

“No problem,” the agent says, and when Lucretia finally leaves the agent shakes her hand and palms her a scrap of paper with her Stone of Farspeech frequency scribbled on it.

Lucretia mentions it to Magnus when she gets back to the ship. Not the flirtation, but the age. “We could say we’re older,” she explains. “If we wanted. I guess because our minds are so old now, maybe we fake it better?”

“Right,” Magnus says. “Uh, what’s that scrap of paper in your hand?”

“Nothing,” Lucretia says, and pops it in her mouth, chews a couple times, and swallows.

Magnus stares at her. “Okay…”

“That was a panic reaction,” Lucretia says, “and I’m really regretting it now.”

 

Cycle eighty-four is a close one.

They find the Light last-minute, after tracking it clear across the mountains and canyons of this plane. The Hunger is already approaching when Lup and Taako locate it, and Davenport shouts over the stone of farspeech for everyone to get ready to go and he’ll try to pick as many people up as possible before getting out. Because, sure, they’re immortal, but dying still sucks.

So Magnus and Barry grab their stuff and book it out of the caves they’d been camping in, making their way out across the plains, and Magnus doesn’t stop looking back over his shoulder because something in his stomach tells him Davenport won’t be fast enough. Everything above them is as black as the void of space, like the Hunger swallowed the sky itself.

The prairie stops ahead of them: drops away into empty space. Magnus slows to a stop, walks to the edge and looks over. It’s sheer, and a hundred feet or more; his rope won’t reach.

“Magnus,” Barry says.

Magnus looks back. The darkness seems to have condensed around the foothills, turning the base of the mountain into a roiling mass of limbs and eyes. Based on the time it took him and Barry to get here, and the speed he knows Barry can run, and how quickly he knows the Hunger moves from years of outrunning it, Magnus gives them minutes.

He’s not a ranger or a rogue, but he’s learned, in the past eighty-four years or so, how to survive. How to mark time by the sun, how to judge his pace, how to read the path the Hunger makes across the sky and guess, by that, how long until he dies.

Barry draws his wand. Magnus grabs his hammer. The Hunger draws near.

In the sky, distant, fleeting, a spark of silver. It darts, dodges a column of inky darkness, and rockets up and out of sight. Magnus feels something in his chest tug and settle. Recognition. Acceptance. The kind of exhaustion that sets in when you have so much farther to go.

Barry looks at Magnus. He’s smiling that smile that sometimes comes over his face when he knows something is about to go very, very wrong, and he’s made his peace with it, and doesn’t care. Magnus sees that smile on Barry’s face a lot these days.

The Hunger roars ever closer, a hundred feet, fifty, twenty. A spear bursts from the approaching horde and plunges through Barry’s chest before Magnus can even react, protection fighter though he is.

“Well,” Barry says, with blood spilling from his chest and bubbling on his lips, “we’ll get them next time.”

Magnus doesn’t get to agree before he dies.

 

Lucretia has put more thought than perhaps anyone else into just how cruel it would be to take a century of life from the crew.

She does it anyway, and when they’re all gone and safe she sits in the Starblaster and lets herself cry. Mortal, for the first time in a hundred years.

 

It’s Barry’s birthday, sort of. Maybe.

He’s in lich form. Dying never gets more fun but he’s sort of used to it by now. But it’s become a pertinent question by now: does he still get to celebrate his birthday? If so, which birthday is it? And if not, can he celebrate the half-dozen dates he’s entered a new body?

Either way, it’s his birthday— the original one. He can’t eat as a lich, so no cake, but he kind of floats out of his cave and goes up the mountain to stargaze. It isn’t the most beautiful sky he’s ever seen in a hundred years of traveling, but he’s grown to like it.

Barry rests in the grass, feels the wind blow through him. Shooting stars flash across the sky. He put in some time a few years back, toward the end of another regeneration, to learn the names of the constellations. He picks them out one by one. The Ash Tree. The Lemniscate. The Wheel, and around it, the Serpent.

There’s a shape in the distant sky, near the horizon. The moon shouldn’t rise for another hour or so. Barry peers at it. It _looks_ like the moon, if a bit dimmer.

And he’d wonder what it is, but building a secret moon base is absolutely the kind of thing Lucretia would do.

Barry sits on the mountainside and watches the false moon rise up into the sky.

 

When Julia knocks on the open door of the workshop, Magnus nearly drops his hand drill. “Hi,” he gets out, trying to cram the hand drill back into its spot on the peg board over the bench.

“Hi,” she says back, smiling. Amused, in that way she usually is when Magnus does something stupid. It makes Magnus’s heart seize up a little in his chest.

Magnus gets all his tools under control and leans on the work bench, trying to look like there isn’t sawdust in his hair. “What’s up?”

Julia shrugs. “I was wondering when your birthday is?”

“Oh, yeah,” Magnus says. “My birthday.”

“Yeah,” Julia agrees, “when is it?”

It’s at this moment that Magnus realizes that he definitely doesn’t know when his birthday is.

“Uh, let me think,” he says, and tries very hard to think logically while Julia waits for a response. “April 20th?”

Julia eyes him. “April 20th? Is that really your birthday?”

“Yeah. April 20th.”

“Right,” Julia says, and nods like she’s committing it to memory. Which she probably is, knowing her. She crosses the room, running her fingers over the back of a glossy mahogany rocking chair, and joins Magnus at the work bench. “What’re you working on?”

 

Nobody knows how old the Director is. She has white hair, and there are crow’s feet around her eyes. The lines around her mouth that might have been laugh lines once, but they crease in frowns more often now. The Director limps sometimes when she walks, a twist in her hip, and the wide sash of her robe is tied tightly to brace her back.

She’s old— that, everyone agrees on. She’s very old.

Avi swears she’s at least three hundred, though nobody really believes that. Carey thinks she’s maybe a really old twenty. Most people think she’s fifty or sixty or seventy— well, nobody really agrees. They watch her when she crosses the lawn, head held high, staff in hand.

Lucretia celebrates her one hundred twenty-sixth birthday and her fifty-sixth birthday and her twenty-sixth birthday all on the same day, in the privacy of her quarters, and wishes she had someone to tell her to light all two hundred eighteen candles. But of course no one is there.

 

Then, some years later, it’s Magnus and Barry and Lucretia in a middle-of-nowhere town, because Magnus is on the road all the time and so is Lucretia and Barry can teleport now, and this tiny town in particular has a bakery Magnus likes. They sell dog biscuits. Three of Magnus’s dogs are there with them: a golden retriever is sleeping on Magnus’s feet, a big gray shepherd mix is sniffing the cake on the picnic table, and a fluffy mountain dog is nosing in Lucretia’s pockets.

The cake has, in Magnus’s words, “a shit-ton of candles”. One hundred thirty-eight for Lucretia, one hundred thirty-seven for Magnus, and one hundred seventy-one for Barry, for a total of four hundred forty-six candles on a cake that doesn’t even have frosting on it anymore. It’s just candles.

“Should we light it?” Magnus asks.

“Please don’t,” Barry says, “Lup would kill me if I died again.”

“What if we just light one?” Lucretia suggests, and casts a quick cantrip.

All four hundred and forty-six candles burst into flame.

When they finally put it out (not without a great deal of panic), they cut the cake and eat it all, right there on the singed and smoking picnic table.

“Happy birthday to us,” Magnus says, and raises his hand for a fist bump.

Lucretia gives him one without even looking at him. “How many candles do you think we can fit on a cake? We need three more every year.”

“Depends on how big the cake is,” Barry says, “but I’d guess at least fifty more.”

“We’ll have to stop eventually,” Lucretia muses.

Magnus cuts himself another piece of cake. “Let’s see how many we can fit first.”

              

The answer is it’s a lot. It’s over five hundred candles. They have to keep finding new bakeries because they get kicked out of most of them even though they’re three of the people who saved the entire world.

And what happens next, or next, or after, probably doesn’t need to be explained, because what happens next is:

life goes on.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was going to be a philosophical meditation on humanity, immortality, and the sheer size and depth of the universe. Mostly it just ended up being about birthdays and shenanigans. Which is pretty in character for TAZ anyway. I’m @swallowtailed on Tumblr— come say hi!


End file.
